The security aspect is the main driver why I’m seeing so many businesses investing in local hardware. They know the models aren’t as good (caveat that they also can’t run Chinese models) and that’s ok. Places that really care about security and data governance already aren’t on the bleeding edge. They wait for the nice stable lts version, they lock down dev machines in frustrating ways and have lots of IT admin layers.

But they also want to taste the sweet fruit of AI so the only way to do this that a CISO will approve is on local air gapped hardware. It’s a niche but still a billion dollar niche.

Microsoft is working on this with their new execution containers (https://github.com/microsoft/mxc)